June 2012

A week before Sunday's crucial presidential elections in
Mexico, CPJ participated on a panel with filmmaker Bernardo Ruíz and Mexican
journalist Sergio Haro about the perilous conditions for journalists in that
country, where CPJ research shows
48 journalists have been murdered or disappeared since outgoing President
Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006.

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With ratings driving the profits of media channels, journalists
and political talk show hosts are being motivated to stir up controversy at any
cost. Meanwhile, the professionals who believe in credibility, objectivity, and
honesty as essential parts of ethical journalism are becoming sidelined.

Ethiopia has always been a country at the cutting edge of Internet
censorship in Africa. In the wake of violence after the 2005 elections, when
other states were only beginning to recognize the potential for online
reporters to bypass traditional pressures, Meles Zenawi's regime was already
blocking major news sites and blog hosts such as blogspot.com. Some sites and Web
addresses have been blocked for their reporting ever since, including exiled
media like Addis Neger Online and Awramba
Times.

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The story sounds hideously like another--one of a chaotic,
predatory attack on a woman journalist in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Clothes torn
from her body, hundreds of men surging to grab her breasts and claw at her. A
woman wondering, "Maybe this is how I go, how I die." It has been almost a year
and a half since CBS correspondent and CPJ board member Lara Logan endured an attack
like this. Now, an independent journalist and student named Natasha Smith
reports that it has happened to her.

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When Thomas Peele came into the CPJ offices last week to
discuss Killing the Messenger, his
book about the murder of journalist Chauncey Bailey, he
described a story that was layered with scandal, including a polygamous cult,
bankruptcy, kidnapping, rape, a flawed confession, leaked evidence, and secret
alliances--not to mention the aggressive attack on a free press. Peele, motivated in part by the blatant demonstration of
corruption in the investigation into Bailey's death, intended to reveal the
truth about the circumstances surrounding the case. Accompanying Peele at CPJ was our own senior
adviser for journalist security, Frank Smyth, who became involved in the case
as a CPJ representative.

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Some journalists continue to receive the warning from Google
about state-sponsored attacks that we mentioned
last week. The message appears on top of logged-in services like Gmail.
Occasionally it will disappear for a few hours and then reappear, but there is
no way to remove it.

At a Bishkek roundtable Tuesday called "The Fourth
Estate: Rule of the Game," Almambet Shykmamatov, Kyrgyzstan's justice minister,
encouraged local reporters to expose government corruption, local press reported. The
minister said authorities would follow up on such reports, grant security to
investigative journalists, and might even pay them up to 20 percent of the
funds that corrupt officials return to state coffers.

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Last week, Tarun Sehrawat, a 22-year-old Indian photographer
for Tehelkamagazine, died from
cerebral malaria and its complications, according to several of his colleagues
and media
accounts. He had returned, ill, from a shooting assignment with Tehelka's reporter Tusha Mittal in May.
The team had been covering the ongoing Maoist revolt in Chhattisgarh in central
India and reported it in "Inside
Abujmarh The Mythic Citadel." Both Sehrawat and Mittal became very
ill, but Sehrawat succumbed. Mittal, we understand, is still recovering.

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The Committee to Protect
Journalists is watching with concern the
progress of H.R.
2899, the Chinese Media Reciprocity Act of 2011, which is under discussion Wednesday
in front of the Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement. The bill
seeks to reduce the number of visas available to journalists (and their
families) working in the United States for 13 Chinese state-controlled
publications. The aim is to pressure Beijing into allowing more Voice of
America reporters into China; VOA staffers tell us that they are allowed only two
China visas to cover a country of more than 1.3 billion people.

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CPJ is monitoring with concern the news coverage of Baker Abdulla
Atyani, a Pakistan-based Jordanian Al-Arabiya TV journalist, and his two
Philippine crew members, Rolando Letrero and Ramelito Vela, who have been
unaccounted for since June 12.

Atyani, Letrero, and Vela left their hotel in Jolo, in the
southern Philippines, to interview a commander for the militant Abu Sayyaf, a
banned Islamic separatist group in the region, according to local and
international news reports. The three refused offers of a security detail from
local authorities, the reports said.

They have not returned. Various news accounts report them as "missing," "kidnapped," and a link between Abu Sayyaf and Al-Qaeda.

For seven years I lived in Panajachel, a tourist town on the beautiful
Atitlán Lake in Guatemala. There, my husband, Juan Miguel Arrivillaga, and I
started a family and the independent news outlet Anti Magazine. We also hosted a radio program on the local station Radio Ati.

With the launch of CPJ's most recent exile report, I will
have worked exactly three years for our Journalist Assistance
program. More than 500 cases later, I have helped journalists who have gone into hiding or exile to escape
threats; those in need of medicine and other support while in prison, and
journalists injured after violent attacks. The most harrowing accounts of
all, however, come from those crossing from Eritrea into Sudan. And things seem
to be getting worse, not better.

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Nadira Isayeva, a 2010 CPJ
International Press Freedom Award winner, has been
living in exile since she left her native Dagestan, in Russia's volatile North
Caucasus, in November 2011. Isayeva, the editor-in-chief of the independent weekly Chernovik, had been harassed by security
forces for her relentless, critical coverage of their heavy-handed
anti-terrorism operations in the region. Yet she was hesitant to leave, unable
to imagine herself not reporting on these issues.

After
fellow human rights advocates finally convinced Isayeva to leave, she came to
New York, where she works as a fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute.
(The interview has been edited).

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On Wednesday, the same day the White
House announced a strategic plan committing the United States to elevating its efforts in "challenging leaders whose actions threaten the
credibility of democratic processes" in sub-Saharan Africa, a senior
member of the U.S. Congress challenged the
erosion of press freedom in a key U.S. strategic partner in the Horn of Africa:
Ethiopia.

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On the frontlines of global reporting, knowledge is safety. CPJ's
event series to promote our new Journalist Security Guide continued Wednesday in Washington,
D.C. where we teamed up with Internews for
a panel discussion on journalist security on-site and online.

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"Bangladeshi democracy [may be] doomed to more of the same,"
International
Crisis Group wrote in a recent commentary. They are describing a
longstanding pattern of antagonism between Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's Awami
League and the opposition Bangladesh National Party (BNP), which the Crisis
Group describes as "a pernicious cycle of zero-sum politics." If the political
situation descends into unrest, journalists covering it will suffer.

"I'm free but I don't feel free," said Mohamed Abdi Urad,
chief editor of Yool, a critical
weekly published in the semi-autonomous republic of Somaliland. Mohamed had
just been released on May 22 after a week in detention at Hargeisa Central
Police Station. His crime?
"I have no idea," he said. Mohamed had attempted to cover a deadly skirmish
between civilians and a military unit over a land dispute in the eastern part
of the capital, Hargeisa. "The Interior Minister just saw me walking towards
the scene and ordered his men to arrest me," he said. A few days later, police
released Mohamed unconditionally and without charge.

Some
weeks ago, the body
of Esmail Amil Enog was found. The corpse had been chopped to pieces and then thrown together in a sack.
Enog was a witness in a grisly massacre in November 2009, which took the lives
of 57 people, 32 of them journalists, on a stretch of lonely highway in the
southern Philippine province of Maguindanao. It was the single largest attack
on journalists in the world.

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On May 25, the Honduran press corps took
to the streets of Tegucigalpa and four other cities to reject the growing
levels of violence against members of the media. Many marchers donned yellow-and-black
t-shirts emblazoned with the words: "Killing journalists will not kill the
truth."

Danish Karokhel,
who won a CPJ International Press Freedom Award in 2008, messaged this morning
concerned that the news agency he runs, Pajhwok
Afghan News, and some other media outlets have been referred to the Attorney
General's Office by the Ministry of Information and Culture for reporting on an
alleged bribery scandal involving a member of Parliament. The action was taken
by the ministry's Media Monitoring Commission, and could lead to criminal
charges.

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China's state news agency Xinhua published the full
text of the state council's National Human Rights Action Plan 2012-15 on
Monday. There is no section dedicated to press freedom. But the most striking
omissions can be found in the text itself.

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Joseph Mutebi, a photojournalist for the popular vernacular
state-owned daily Bukedde, spent his afternoon trying to
file a complaint with the police in the capital, Kampala. "First they told me
the officer who assaulted me was based at another station, so I went there and
now they are telling me he is based at the police station where I originally
went. So I am confused. I think they are just playing with me." Mutebi's case
is not uncommon--both in terms of the constant threat journalists face from
Uganda's police force and the challenges they encounter trying to file a
complaint.

The last few weeks have offered the strongest indications
yet that nation-states are using customized software to exploit security flaws
on personal computers and consumer Internet services to spy on their users. The
countries suspected include the United States, Israel, and China. Journalists
should pay attention--not only because this is a growing story, but because if
anyone is a vulnerable target, it's reporters.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, in
opening remarks at her press conference in Islamabad on Thursday, addressed a wide
range of problems in Pakistan, including those faced by journalists. (The full statement is on
the website of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.) What was
especially gratifying was her mention of meeting with human rights defender and
former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association Asma Jahangir at her
home--a
request we made on Tuesday of Pillay and E.U. Foreign Policy Chief
Catherine Ashton, who was also on an official trip to Pakistan.

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Talking about genocide
prevention in the shadow of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps brings
an intense and unique gravity to the discussions. The academic presentations cannot
extract themselves from the looming presence of the barbed wires and grim
towers surrounding the Nazis' most infamous death factory.

In China, people know enough not to take to the streets to
commemorate the brutal crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Beijing
is very quiet in the days before and after June 4. The Internet is a different
story.

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The
New Delhi-based Tehelka magazine
published an open
letter by imprisoned freelance journalist Lingaram
Kodopi on Monday. Kodopi, one of the two journalists CPJ documented in prison in India on
December 1, 2011, has been held without charge since September 2011 as a
suspected associate of insurgent Maoists in Chhattisgarh. His supporters
believe he faces harassment for documenting police violence in the region.

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There is no better time than now for U.N. High Commissioner
for Human Rights Navi Pillay and EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton to
step out of their tightly planned schedule of meetings in Pakistan and make a
trip to the home of human rights activist Asma Jahangir.

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South African journalist and arts critic Charl Blignaut made
what turned out to be an excellent prediction. "Of all the work on show, it's
this depiction of the president that will set the most tongues wagging and most
likely generate some howls of disapproval," he wrote on May 13 in a review of
an art exhibition in Johannesburg.

Activists
from three different political parties died during the 15-day campaign period
leading up to the elections, in which the ruling Cambodian People's Party won a
large majority of seats, according to a report issued by the Committee for Free
and Fair Elections in Cambodia (Comfrel).
The Phnom Penh Postran articles on "allegations
of intimidation, ghost voting, and electoral-roll sabotage" in the election,
and the U.S. government-funded Voice of America (VOA) published a story
headlined "Observers: Cambodian Vote
Improved but Problems Remain."

For
a good historical perspective on the abuse of journalists in Sri Lanka, Iqbal
Athas, the recipient of a 1994 International Press Freedom Award from CPJ, wrote a center-page
spread for the 25th anniversary edition of the Sunday Times, a popular weekly in Colombo. Athas, a critical
journalist who specializes in defense issues, works as an associate editor and
defense correspondent for the Times.

The lede to his article recounts a 1998 incident in which armed men invaded his home while he, his wife, and their seven-year-old daughter watched television. After the men left, the story spread, and all night, they received phone calls from friends and acquaintances inquiring about their safety. In his article, Athas describes how one of the callers was then-Minister of Fisheries Mahinda Rajapaksa. Rajapaksa was trying to make a name for himself as a champion of human rights and offered his support to the Athas family.

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The
climate of impunity that fostered the November 23, 2009, massacre of 57
people, including 32 journalists, is alive and well not only on the southern
Philippines island of Mindanao, where the massacre took place, but in all of
the country. The revelation that the brutalized body of a key witness to the
killings, Esmail Enog, was found two months after he had gone missing is an
indicator of that. Enog testified last year that he had driven gunmen to the
site of the November massacre, news reports said. The killings wiped out almost
an entire generation of journalists in the region.

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Former
Attorney General Mohan Peiris has been ordered to testify about a statement he
made at the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva on November 9, 2011, in
which he said that Prageeth
Eknelygoda was alive and living outside the country (see "Sri
Lanka's savage smokescreen"). Peiris will have to appear at the Homogama
Magistrate's Court in Colombo on June 5, next Tuesday, which has been hearing
the case brought by Eknelygoda's wife, Sandhya, to learn more about his disappearance
on January 24, 2010.